


you see right through me

by lesbianrobin



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Bathrooms, Crying, Gen, High School, Panic Attacks, Period-Typical Homophobia, hurt and eventual comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:54:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21688675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lesbianrobin/pseuds/lesbianrobin
Summary: They care, Steve repeats to himself. They care. People care about him. It’s not ideal, but it’s something. He can work with it. Nobody’s ever been voted Prom King after they had a breakdown in the parking lot during study hall.-Robin hates boys. This guy’s voice sounds just as annoying as her crying does, though, so at least it isn’t just her being victimized by the bathroom tiles.-Steve and Robin have always had something in common. It just took them a while to figure it out.
Relationships: Robin Buckley & Steve Harrington
Comments: 39
Kudos: 470





	1. they see right through me

Robin knows that she’s lucky.

She lives in a fairly nice house in a fairly nice neighborhood, and she doesn’t have to share a bedroom with anyone. Her parents are still together, and they love each other, and they love her too. They’ve never really had to worry about money, except for when her mom broke her foot a couple of years ago, but then her Aunt Nora helped cover the bills until Mom could go back to work, so everything was fine. Everything has always been fine.

Those are the reasons why she’s lucky, according to every nice old church lady and moralizing school counselor that she’s ever met. Robin can’t really argue with them. She’s never had to worry about going cold or hungry. Her parents don’t know that she’s gay, but seeing as how her godfather has lived with the same “roommate” since she was a baby and they send her joint birthday checks, she doesn’t think her parents would ever kick her out over it. If they did, Robin’s pretty sure that’s what godparents are for in the first place, so she’d probably land on her feet. Ken and Charlie send _very_ generous birthday checks. 

So she’s fortunate. Not fortunate like the rich assholes from Loch Nora or the rich douchebags who drive around her entire college fund like it’s no big deal or the rich jerkoffs who always seem to be accompanied by a host of dedicated rich friends, but fortunate. 

She feels like she's drowning. 

It's become something of a routine, ducking out during Theatre to have a mental breakdown somewhere quiet. Everybody's running some errand or another, sorting in the prop closet or working in the woodshop or running to the store for more nails, so it's easy to get lost in the bustle. Honestly, if her teachers stopped taking attendance, she could spend every period hiding and it's unlikely anybody would ever notice. She makes it outside just in time to see Steve Harrington tear out of the parking lot, disco blaring from his speakers so loudly that she can hear it for a couple seconds even once he’s disappeared from view.

“Asshole.” No wonder he can barely fucking read. Apparently getting an education isn’t high on his list of priorities.

Robin finds a spot just out of view of the parking lot and sits down with her script open, back to the school’s brick wall. Her breaths are getting shorter and she tries to flip to the most dramatic scene in the show just in case anybody comes along and wonders why she’s sobbing like she’ll never be happy again. Everyone will think she’s the most devoted actress in Hawkins High history. 

-

“Did you hear that _Nancy’s_ the one who dumped _him?_ ”

“What?”

“Yeah. For _Jonathan Byers_.”

“Oh, ew! No way.”

“I swear.”

“No fucking way, who told you that?”

Steve’s been trying to study. It’s hard, without Nancy. He knows that he should be able to study alone. He just can’t, though, without anybody reminding him of what he’s supposed to be focusing on, without Nancy looking over his shoulder and expecting to see notes and a working outline for his essay, without anyone to hold him accountable. It’s like he can’t make his brain understand the words on the page without Nancy’s arm pressing against his own. Whenever he moves his pencil and presses it into his notebook, no words come to mind. He just sits there with an open book and his pencil in position without writing anything like an asshole. 

“Chris, on the basketball team. He said that Steve was, like, crying in the shower.”

Steve always liked Chris. They got Burger King together after practice one time. He doesn’t remember ever crying in the shower at school, but he guesses it could have happened. After everything with Billy and the new monsters, his life got kind of hazy. Things have just recently started to feel real again. 

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, and according to Carol, Nancy’s been fucking Jonathan the whole time. Like, Steve caught them back when they first got together last year, and that’s what the whole-”

A beat of silence.

“-thing was about.”

“Oh my god, _Jonathan_ did that?” Steve recognizes that voice. It’s Pamela Bryant. They’ve been in the same math class every year since elementary school. Sometimes they’d split homework and share the answers.

“ _Yeah_ . I don’t know what the hell’s going on there, but, like- _she_ dumped _him_ ! For _Jonathan_!”

He isn’t sure, but he thinks that’s Jordan Turner. She asked him for help jumping her car after school one time after she left her lights on all day. He’d taught her how to attach the jumper cables properly and she offered to buy him dinner in return, but he was with Nancy at the time, so he turned her down.

“Who the hell cheats on- no, fuck that, who _dumps_ Steve Harrington? I know he’s not, like, what he was, but… _still_.”

Steve shuts his book harder than he meant to, and they stop talking.

He doesn’t look over to where they’re sitting. He puts everything in his bag as normally as he can manage, which means that he throws it all in so quickly that he’s pretty sure his pencil actually missed the bag and dropped to the floor, but he’s not about to get down there on his hands and knees to find it underneath the library table, so he just zips up his backpack and slings it over his shoulder. 

Steve is halfway to the bathroom when he suddenly thinks about Nancy’s pretty face and soft lips and playful tone, and now he can’t hide out in the bathroom, so instead he walks straight past the bathroom, past his locker and Nancy’s and Jonathan’s and Carol’s, past the front office and out into the parking lot where he collapses into his car panting like he’s run a marathon. The cold air is sharp in his lungs and it makes things worse and better. He considers turning on his car and blasting the heat, but he’s already inviting someone to give him a detention. He really doesn’t want to get another detention. At least if he doesn’t turn the car on, he’s got plausible deniability and he’ll just get in trouble for ditching study hall, not for trying to skip. 

His chest hurts. Breaths grow faster and sharper, and he feels kind of dizzy, and distantly Steve is aware that he’s hyperventilating. Fuck, the air is cold. It’s really cold. His lips and the tips of his fingers are tingling as he tries to calm down, in and out and in and out like knives slicing into his chest, clenching the steering wheel and wishing that he wasn’t alone and wanting everybody else in the world to disappear. Everything could disappear, and then there would be no reason to lose his shit like this in the middle of the school day. It would just be him and his thoughts. Steve tries to breathe in a little deeper. 

Tommy and Carol usually fuck around and smoke outside around this time. He hopes that they aren’t looking at the parking lot. It doesn’t matter, he _knows_ it doesn’t matter, but he doesn’t want to have to hear about this during lunch. He doesn’t want to hear about how his face went red and he was sobbing like a baby all alone in his car without even the radio on to drown out the sound of his choking gasps. Every time anything fucking happens, he has to hear about it. They all care.

They care, Steve repeats to himself. They care. People care about him. It’s not ideal, but it’s something. He can work with it. Nobody’s ever been voted Prom King after they had a breakdown in the parking lot during study hall. 

He breathes. 

The headache gets worse before it gets better. Steve hears the bell ring and his fingertips are still tingling. When he angles his rearview mirror to look at his face, it’s a puffy red mess, so he skips English and tells himself that he’ll try to read The Great Gatsby again when he gets home. The words won’t make much sense and he’ll be even further behind in class than he already is, flipping through the dictionary for the words he doesn’t know and then completely forgetting what was happening in the story by the time he gets back to it and having to start all over. He’s just going to keep lying to himself. He’ll end up three chapters into the book two days before the test, and then he’s going to panic and drive to the bookstore that’s twenty-eight miles away and buy the CliffsNotes and struggle to even get through that, and then he’ll bomb the test and every test after it too, and then he’ll get a D, and his dad will beat him over the head with his report card and make him clean the gutters while he watches from the ground and tells him that he’s doing it all wrong, and when Steve comes down he’ll spend the next hour hearing about how he even managed to fuck up a task so simple that any moron with working arms and legs could do it, and then he’ll go hide in his room until his dad leaves for work again, and he’ll look at that stupid report card and wish that he could be like Nancy and Jonathan and all of the kids and apparently everybody else in the world who can sit down and read a book and understand it all without even having to try. He’s not like them. He’s Steve Harrington, and he got dumped for Jonathan Byers, but it really had nothing to do with Jonathan and everything to do with the fact that Nancy never loved him, which makes sense because he can’t even fucking read a book in the library without having a mental breakdown, and Steve wouldn’t really want to date Steve, either. Who would? Pamela and Jordan, maybe, but they’re definitely more interested in insulting Nancy and Jonathan than they are in Steve himself.

They probably won’t vote for him when Prom rolls around, now that he stormed out of the library right in front of them like a freak, but he can fix it. He can be normal. Maybe if nobody catches him being weird again between now and then, he’ll get that stupid plastic crown, and they’ll put him in the yearbook, and he’ll be able to say that he did something in high school besides get his ass kicked and his heart broken.

He’s not going to be normal again by the end of English. He starts the car, turns up the radio, and since he can’t go home early without his mom asking questions, he takes a couple of deep, even breaths, and hopes that a twenty-eight-mile drive will be enough to fix the jumbled mess inside his head. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i definitely intended to post something by the end of october. i swear i meant to. school just... happened. but here i am! thanks to my greatest love sarah (mjolnirbreaker on here, @steveharrington on tumblr) as always for inspiring, encouraging, and supporting me <3
> 
> title from "the archer" by taylor swift. this should shake out to be four or five parts, and i should get them all up by christmas. please let me know what you think, either in a comment here or by messaging me on tumblr @lesbianrobin! i really appreciate feedback
> 
> til next time!


	2. i see right through me

Maybe if he shaved his fucking head or got a lip piercing, people would stop caring about Steve Harrington so much. They’d talk about how he ruined his looks instead of how he’s ruined his life, and he could handle it, he thinks. It would be easier. A terrible tattoo or something would at least be intentional. 

Everybody's talking about their plans.

He still hasn't figured out what to say when people ask. He's tried playing coy, but that runs its course pretty quickly and then he's got to stutter through some bullshit about a gap year, figuring things out, going on a cross-country road trip, doing some work for his grandfather, driving his car off a fucking cliff, taking the bat out of his trunk and tracking down Billy Hargrove. It’s okay for other people to be screwing around, working at the local diner or going to the community college, but Steve Harrington’s a basketball star and his dad’s got plenty of dough to bankroll his tuition, so he can’t say that he’s saving up or thinking about his options. All he can do is figure out new ways to admit that he’s a failure. Hopefully by some point he’ll figure one out that doesn’t elicit a laugh or a look of pity. 

They make him wear the sash to school on Monday. He shoves the crown into his backpack once the yearbook kids take some more pictures of him with Alice Rollins (in front of the trophy case, of course) and Jonathan looks like he wants to say something, but Steve doesn’t know what he could possibly say that wouldn’t just make it hurt more, so instead he pretends that everything is cool, smiling and patting him on the arm as he acts like he’s more late for class than he actually is. He tells Jonathan that they won’t be friends anymore if he uses one of the ones from before Steve fixed his hair halfway through, and Jonathan is so struck by the fact that Steve called them friends that Steve is able to slip away without having to hear any awkward platitudes or apologies.

-

When she was a kid, Robin always imagined that being seventeen would mean driving around in a convertible with a guy or in a big van full of quirky friends, radio blasting, music paling in comparison to the sound of their laughter. If she ever cried, it would be because she had just had her tender young heart broken, and her practical yet carefree and energetic brunette best friend would be by her side, balancing her out in every way and coaching her through. It would probably be happening on a dock somewhere, or on the top of a building with an incredible view of the town below. 

She’s pretty sure she accidentally swallowed a bug while biking to school this morning. Her heaving breaths echo in the boys’ bathroom so terribly that they almost sound like the backing track to some shitty technopop song. 

Boys bathrooms are better for crying. Girls who hear you crying always want to ask if you’re alright or grab a teacher or offer you a tampon. Boys tend to mind their own business. 

The door squeaks and Robin tries to level out her breathing. She can’t stop thinking about it, though, about how Tiffany and Rachel laughed about that one woman with short hair that works at the local mechanic, asked Robin wouldn’t she just kill herself if she was such a dyke? Robin had played with her necklace while pivoting the topic of conversation back to their final project, like it proved something. Like wearing something dangly and shiny around her neck proves that she’s being a woman in the right way, that she knows how, that she’s not defective. Her lungs keep working overtime as tears spill from her eyes, squeezed shut like that’s gonna keep the random guy from noticing her. 

“Uh… Are you… alright?”

Robin hates boys. This guy’s voice sounds just as annoying as her crying does, though, so at least it isn’t just her being victimized by the bathroom tiles. 

“You don’t have to, uh, talk to me, just… y’know, whatever it is, it’s probably not as bad as it seems right now.”

Robin can’t help but scoff.

“Okay, yeah, that’s fair, I don’t know your business. I guess I just meant that… whenever I’m crying, I always feel like the world’s ending, but then eventually I run out of tears and everything is still there. Like, nothing’s really better, but it’s not any worse, either. Does that make sense? Sorry, I’ll just… I’ll just go use the one by the gym-”

“It makes sense,” Robin croaks. 

“Oh, you’re-” the guy says under his breath, but the bathroom tiles amplify it so that Robin knows he’s surprised. “Yeah, that’s cool. It does?”

“Yeah,” she sniffs. “Can’t cry forever.” She rips some toilet paper off the roll and uses it to blow her nose. Not like she’s gonna exit the stall so the guy can recognize her in the future. 

“Right.” He’s quiet for a little bit. “If this is… about high school shit-”

“Sort of.”

“Yeah, so, high school shit. It’s dumb. What are you, a freshman?”

“Junior,” Robin says, insulted.

“Well, whatever, I’m a senior, so I’m still older than you.”

“Barely!”

“It counts, I’m giving you wisdom, shut up. People are never gonna be happy no matter what you do. Even if you can make everybody like you, it’s not, like… I don’t know. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. That many people can’t actually know you enough to like  _ you _ , you know? I don’t know what I’m saying-”

“Having too many people that like me isn’t really my problem,” Robin laughs. Her breathing’s evened out now. 

She hears something rustling.

“Here,” he says, and Robin hears a zipper. “I don’t want it anyway. You like dressing up?”

“...On occasion ,” she responds, too bewildered to say anything else. “What, do you have a French maid costume in there?”

He laughs, a big ugly “ _ HA! _ ” that makes Robin grin despite herself. 

“Better,” and then there’s a glint of something flying over the stall partition, and then there’s a plastic crown in her lap.

Robin stares at it. There’s a single shiny brown strand of hair tangled around a shoddily glued-on jewel. 

His backpack zips. “I hope you feel better,” Steve Harrington says, “But I actually really have to go to the bathroom, so. Bye.” Robin hears the door squeak again.

Holy  _ shit _ .


	3. can you see right through me?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one's a bit different. hope you all enjoy <3

Steve Harrington's crown lives on her dresser.

Sometimes it's Robin's most treasured possession. Sometimes she's convinced that it's cursed. One night she laid in bed and threw it straight up in the air over and over until she missed and it came down and hit her in the face, and then she put it back on her dresser. She got used to it after a while. Now every morning before she leaves the house she looks at it like it knows something, something that it might eventually tell her someday if she can prove she’s worthy. Like it’s Thor’s hammer of popularity and normalcy.

Robin didn’t look at it this morning. This morning she was in a hurry. She’s not wearing any makeup today besides whatever black gunk around her eyes she couldn’t scrub off last night, and all she’s got around her wrist is a watch. Her neck and ears are bare. It feels kind of like she’s naked.

Steve just barely nods at her when she clocks in, and she glances around the break room for a mirror. She can’t look that bad. He doesn’t know, right? He can’t. She hasn’t done anything. He’s Steve Harrington, he doesn’t pay attention to anyone but himself. He can’t have looked that closely at her shoes.

The hours tick by and Robin chews at her thumbnail whenever she’s not handling a customer.

It’s so unfair. It’s so ridiculously fucking unfair that he’s graduated and he should be out of her life forever, but not a single college would do Robin a favor and fucking take the guy, so now he’s here, three feet away from her, scooping ice cream and staring into space and making her feel like shit. Maybe it’s the makeup. He only talked to her during work because he thought she was, like, hot, but now that she’s in her natural fucking state he can’t even act decent and look at her.

And it’s such bullshit, that she even cares what Steve Harrington thinks of her. He might be a loser now, but he’s still Steve Harrington, and he knows people, and if he knows things that he could tell those people then he could make Robin’s life hell. 

He doesn’t even have to  _ know _ . He could just say,  _ hey, Brenda, don’t you think it’s weird how that Robin chick doesn’t even bother to try and make herself pretty? No way she’ll ever get a guy, mean as she is, _ and stupid Brenda from Trig could be like,  _ oh my God, I bet she’s totally a carpet muncher,  _ and even if Steve said  _ I don’t know I think she’s just mean _ stupid Brenda from Trig would tell stupid Ally from band who would tell the whole stupid brass section, and then stupid Steve would fuck stupid Brenda who’s stupid fucking hot and Robin would be run out of town with pitchforks and torches.

Okay, maybe she needs a distraction. 

She leaves Steve at the counter to grab  _ Jane Eyre _ from her backpack. If she cries she’ll have a reason sitting right in front of her. 

-

He feels empty sometimes, now. It's not like the way that he used to feel empty sometimes. It's different now. Better and so much worse. 

Because now when he feels a little empty he knows what he's missing, knows exactly what would fill that aching hole in his chest that shrinks and grows with the change of the seasons. He can't figure out what causes these bouts of emptiness, beyond just the condition of life itself, and he used to know why, or at least he used to think he knew why. They were because his parents left again, because Tommy made a joke that pierced his mind like a splinter he couldn't get out, because he got a D on his test, or because Nancy Wheeler slept with Jonathan Byers. 

Now they come and go however they please, the bouts of emptiness, and he always guesses at the cause but he never seems to find it.

It's the uniform, probably. It's having to wear the terrible hat and embarrassing shorts and the little nametag with an anchor on it.

Steve actually kinda likes the little anchor, though. It's cute. The shorts are surprisingly comfortable, and they've got deep pockets. He looks really good in blue. Besides, he's been wearing this shit for a week now and it's never made him feel like this before. 

Robin keeps giving him looks. She's nervous. They've only been working together for a week, but working minimum wage is kind of like being in boot camp or the trenches, in that there's really nothing to do when you get a brief reprieve from suffering besides get to know whichever unlucky bastards you're suffering with, so you get used to each other pretty quickly. Robin's smart. Steve knows she is because she has homework over the summer which means she's in AP classes, which means that those looks are because she knows he's acting weird and not like himself, because she's smart and smart people notice that kind of thing.

Steve notices that kind of thing, too.

He wipes the counter. Maybe it's that song that was on the radio when he started his car this morning. He'd never heard it before, can't remember a single word of it now, but he remembers feeling something dark settle over his shoulders like a heavy quilt at the sound of it. It was sad. A song like that wasn't meant to be played in June. October, maybe. December. He would recognize it in a second if he heard it again, but something tells him that he probably never will.

The worst part about the empty spells is how he thinks. It's like the emotions were taking up too much room in his head, and now that they've gone his thoughts are getting bigger, filling the whole space and pressing against the inside of his skull until all he wants to do is slam his head against something cold and hard to shock them back into line.

Maybe Billy Hargrove punched a hole straight through his soul and now it'll be there forever, ugly and raw and desperate, the spot where… well, where something used to live. Something that's been gone since that night. It's dumb and poetic but he means it. Maybe he took too many hits to the head and his brain lost some part of him that he can never get back.

This is what happens when his emotions give his thoughts too much space to roam. They go places that Steve doesn't want them to.

Maybe this time he can actually learn something. He must be thinking about that night for a reason.

The most obvious is that he misses Dustin. It's only been a couple of weeks, but he misses Dustin all the time even when he's still in Hawkins so it makes sense that Dustin being so far away and essentially unreachable might trigger something bigger than just  _ missing _ . Dustin fits into the ugly gap in Steve's soul like a loud, overdramatic, nerdy, affectionate little puzzle piece. 

Not quite like a puzzle piece. More like… 

It's not a gap. It's silence, he realizes, this empty part of him, and Dustin's kind of like a boombox at a party playing Steve's favorite song. That, or it's darkness, and Dustin's like a floodlight. He doesn't fit in neatly, but he drowns it all out, suffocates the emptiness in Steve whenever he's around so well that Steve forgets it's there until he leaves.

"I think you might wear a hole in that rag," Robin says, and Steve's arm jerks in surprise, nearly taking out a nearby container of sprinkles. She snickers and he rolls his eyes, tucking the rag half into his pocket like he might need it at any second. He just likes to be prepared.

"Hello? Anything up there? You've been totally zoned for, like, an hour."

"It hasn't been an  _ hour _ ," he says, then takes a look at his watch. It's almost closing time. 

"Well, shit."

"Must have been thinking about something  _ reeaal _ important," Robin mocks, because that's how they make things bearable and it’s much better than trying to take things seriously while they’re wearing sailor suits.

"I was, actually," Steve finds himself saying, "My brother." 

Robin's eyebrows raise a little and Steve feels a bit satisfied. It might be the first time he's ever caught her off guard.

"Didn't know there was another Harrington running around somewhere. Hawkins really is a shithole." 

Steve scoffs. "Well, you can rest easy, he's not actually my brother. Just a friend of mine."

"That you… call your brother?" 

"Yeah, maybe!"

She narrows her eyes.

"I haven't…" Steve shakes his head. "I don't know why I even said that, I don't call him my brother. Guess it just sounded better than saying I was zoned over some random friend."

As he says it, he realizes that he wasn't even really zoned over Dustin in the first place. He's the solution, not the problem. What's the fucking problem? Why can he never find it?

"Alright," Robin slowly says, eyebrows raised as she turns back to her book. She plays with her hair, twirling a strand around her finger, wrapping and unwrapping, over and over again. No pages turn. While Steve starts packing things up, he notices her glancing at him a few times.

Robin’s not wearing makeup today. Steve didn’t say anything about it because his mother raised him better than that, but he is a little worried about her. He’s not the only one that’s been acting weird. Is the makeup thing the problem or a symptom? Maybe it’s unrelated. She just seems kind of like she’s afraid, for some reason.

“I’m sorry, I’ve been a shitty coworker today,” he says. Robin looks at him out of the corner of her eye like she’s surprised. “Thanks for handling most of the customers. I’m just in a weird funk, I don’t know. I’ll be normal tomorrow, I swear.”

She closes her book. He feels like he just got the right answer on Jeopardy and stops himself from pumping his fist. “You’re never normal, but you’re definitely gonna deal with the customers tomorrow. No way I’m talking to that creep from the fuckin’ doll store again.”

Steve shudders. “Ugh, I hate that guy. Nobody with a mustache should be allowed to sell dolls.”

“Or hang around in an ice cream shop for an hour,” Robin adds, finally turning away from her book, and they laugh. Has she actually faced him like this once since he clocked in? Jesus, he really was in his own head.

“I like your freckles,” he says, “Not, like- I have some, you know, but they’re super dark and they’re just kind of random. Not, like, light and even. You got lucky.”

She scrunches up her face. “Thanks, weirdo.”

“Shut up, I’m complimenting you.”

Robin’s smiling, just a little. Just the very corner of her mouth, even though her eyes are still cold. “You know, there’s a fine line between compliments and being a creep.”

“Whatever, fine. Learned my lesson. Robin hates compliments.” He raises his hands as if in surrender, then checks his watch. “Looks like you’re free to run far, far away from me.”

“Really?” Robin checks her own watch. “Oh, sweet.”

She hops the counter to pull down the gate and close off the store while Steve sorts out the ice cream freezer and double checks the register. Their closing routine’s gotten quicker every night, mostly because they realized that nobody can really tell whether or not they mopped the floors as long as there’s no melted ice cream anywhere.

They’re quiet as they punch out and gather their things in the back room. Where’s that little green space dude Dustin gave him before he went to camp? Steve usually keeps it in his pocket to play with when he gets bored. He pats down his shorts, turns the pockets inside out, and curses when all he finds are his wallet and keys.

"Shit, I can't find…" Steve trails off, ducking his head under the table to see if maybe he dropped it earlier.

"Your dignity? Can't lose something you never had, bud." Robin grunts as she lifts her backpack from the floor.

"... _ Oh! _ " 

"Find what you were looking for?" 

Can't lose something you never had. You can't find something that was never there.

"Yeah," he says instinctively, then, "No. No, I just remembered I left it at home."

"Happy for you, dingus," she says condescendingly, and it feels good.

The problem isn't something that's happening. It's everything that  _ isn't _ . How can he find the cause when there isn’t any? All he’s got in his life right now is nothing. His future is a question mark. Dustin’s great, but he’s still a kid, and there’s stuff that Steve can’t burden him with. He doesn’t have anybody that he  _ can _ , nobody who could hear that there’s a silence and a darkness and an emptiness in him and just take it in and stay with him anyway. He thought he’d have a future, have that confidante in Nancy, but that was all bullshit and now he’s got nothing.

Steve kind of wishes that he hadn’t figured it out.

Maybe then he’d still think he could fix it.


	4. help me hold on to you

"I really need to get out of Hawkins." 

They're laying on Robin's bed. Everything hurts, but his hair is clean, his clothes aren’t polyester, and there’s no more blood on his face, so he speaks lightly, like nothing’s wrong in the world. 

"I've accepted that I'm gonna die here." 

Robin’s head turns away from the ceiling so she can talk right into his ear. They haven’t stopped ringing yet. "Christ, Steve, how were you more optimistic when we were tied up and waiting to be tortured?" 

"It's one of my many talents." 

She snorts. "Many?"

"I hate you." 

"I can take those PJs back whenever I want."

"You know I'm not wearing underwear, right?" 

She groans. “Gross, dude!” 

“Hey, I don’t wanna hear it, piss-pants!”

Robin shrieks with laughter, curling up and turning her whole body toward Steve, who shifts to his side so they’re facing each other. She laughs like she's never been happier in her whole entire life.

“Hey,” he says, suddenly quiet.

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

Robin’s eyebrows crease a little. It’s soft, barely there, but her eyes are narrowed. God, he hopes she knows what he means. She’s smart. She’s his best friend, he thinks, maybe, not like how Tommy was his best friend and Nancy was his best friend and Dustin is his best friend. She has to know what he means. 

He smiles, hoping she’ll realize there’s nothing to be worried about. His lip burns. “You don’t have to say it back. I just… wanted you to know, I guess.”

“I do,” she says. Her eyes go wide. Serious, Steve hopes. Trusting. Honest.

“Know?”

“Love you, dingus.”

His split lip screams, but he smiles anyway. “Cool.”

It occurs to him that he can’t remember the last time someone told him that. 

“God, I can’t remember the last time someone told me that.”

The crease in her eyebrows comes back, and Steve’s lip isn’t screaming anymore. “Well, I love you,” she says, almost indignantly, “So, you know. There.”

“Shit, I don’t think that drug is gone.”

A huff of air from Robin’s nose. “No, not quite.”

He shifts to lay on his back again, gazing up at Robin’s ceiling and wishing it was one of those popcorn deals so he had something to look at besides smooth white plaster. Are ceilings plaster? Steve doesn’t really know what plaster is. 

Robin’s weight shifts and his heart seizes, and then she settles again, still by his side, and he breathes. 

“Nobody else knows,” she croaks, and then her hand is in his. Their fingers intertwine.

Steve holds on for dear life. 

-

“This is gonna sound crazy,” Steve says, squeezing her hand, “But I feel like you get me better than anyone.”

“You were alone,” Robin says plainly. She doesn’t know where the words came from, but they feel right.

Steve always used to be surrounded by people. Even once he lost his posse, he always had Nancy by his side, and after that he usually hung around with some girl or another, or some guy on the basketball team. Robin rarely saw him in the hallway without his arm slung around somebody’s shoulders. He was always the one reaching out, she realizes. Always the one surprising Nancy Wheeler by her locker or tugging some jock into a side-hug or prompting random passerby for high-fives.

“I guess, yeah.” He takes a deep breath, and it scares Robin that she can hear his lungs rattle. “Yeah, I kinda was.”

She squeezes his hand. “Like me.”’

“You’re not gonna die in Hawkins,” he proclaims.

“I almost did.”

“ _ Almost _ . Besides, it was, like, objectively the coolest place in town we could have possibly died.”

Something about that’s oddly comforting. If she had died in Hawkins tonight, she would have done it with Steve.

“Why do you think you’re gonna die here?”

“Come on, Rob, we both know I’m a loser. I’m not going anywhere.  _ You _ , though, you’ve got, like…”

The words hang in the air. Her bones ache. Robin nudges his shoulder.

“I’ve got what?”

His head shakes slowly on the pillow next to her. “A spark, I guess. Skills. Smarts. All of those S-words.”

“Shit?”

Steve snickers. “Yeah, that too.”

“You realize why I have all that shit, right?”

Her thumb is rubbing Steve’s hand. Robin doesn’t know when she started doing that.

“Why?”

“To get out. I always figured… well, you know, soccer’s not bad for scholarships, but I could screw up my knee tomorrow and never play again. So I play clarinet, because every school’s got a marching band. I keep learning languages so I can put them on my applications, and I can apply to study abroad, or I could work as a tutor, you know? I do theatre, and take all the APs, and join every fucking club to learn every fucking skill, and I save all my money from Scoops so that there’s nothing that can keep me here forever. There’s always… I’ll always have a way out, you know?”

She looks from the corner of her eye. Steve’s face is unreadable.

“It’s stupid.”

“It’s smart,” he says, and laughs. It’s  _ real _ , too, real and light and joyous. “I counted on basketball, you know. Then Billy Hargrove smashed a plate over my head and bruised my ribs and I couldn’t play while the scouts were here, so I just… all I had was the applications. My stupid fucking essay and my shitty GPA and no extracurriculars but basketball.” He laughs again.

Steve turns his head and their eyes meet. 

“ _ You’re getting out, _ Robin,” he says, eyes shining, and she almost believes him.

Robin hasn’t cried all night. It’s unbelievable, really, that she’s gotten away with only watery eyes so far, and it feels ridiculous for this to be the thing that pushes her over the edge, so she shuts her eyes tight to avoid Steve’s earnest stare. In and out, she breathes, squeezing his hand.

“Is that…”

She opens her eyes to find him peering at her dresser. The crown glints like it always does, catching the light from her bedside table lamp and throwing it onto a few other trinkets atop the dresser.

“That was me,” she says slowly, watching his face, “In the bathroom. My friends were talking about d- uh, girls, you know, like me, and I just…”

“I can’t believe you kept it,” he whispers, like he’s looking at something unbelievable. He didn’t sound this way when he saw a giant monster a few hours ago.

She chokes back tears. “Well, I needed something of yours to cast a hex, so.”

Steve’s eyes are fixed on the crown.

Robin wonders how many Steves she’s going to see before she dies. This isn’t Steve “the Hair” Harrington, or King Steve, or Popeye the Sailor Man, or Big Brother Steve, or even the Steve who woke up in a secret Russian base and promised her he’d think of something. He’s all of them at once, in a way, but that’s not quite right because Robin can’t see a trace of it in his face. He’s all of them in the sense that none of them are entirely fake, but they’re all some kind of performance. This is just… bare. Something that’s both more and less than just Steve. It’s like she’s pulling back the curtain, turning off the smoke machine and shattering the mirrors to find that the man behind the illusions is so much smaller and so much  _ more _ than she thought.

This is the Steve she recognizes from the bathroom.

“Hey,” he says.

“Yeah?” she asks.

“Sometimes,” Steve says, still staring at the crown, “I think about kissing guys.”

This Steve is almost like looking in a mirror.

“It isn’t… I still like girls. I loved Nancy. It was real for me, you know, even if… even though it wasn’t for her.”

This time, Robin rubs circles on Steve’s hand intentionally.

“It’s okay,” she says like it’s easy, before realizing that it is.

He tears his eyes away from the crown, looking at her once again, more fear in his eyes than Robin’s seen all week. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She smiles. “You like who you like.”

He’s frowning. Robin wants to tell him that he’ll give himself wrinkles.

“But I’m not… I don’t…” He sighs, closing his eyes and taking a breath. “I guess I do some stuff that’s… I spend too much time on my hair, and I keep thinking about how cool it would be to wear earrings, and I’m kind of obsessed with that guy’s cut-off shirt in the Freddy Krueger movie, but I don’t…”

God, she wants to laugh. It sounds so ridiculous coming from him.

“Steve,” she says softly, and his eyes open. The fear is still there, but there's less of it now. More uncertainty. “Putting on makeup and shit in the morning doesn’t make me want to kiss girls any less. Just like how playing soccer and wearing my dad’s old clothes sometimes didn’t make me want to kiss girls in the first place. It’s all just… bullshit.”

“Bullshit,” he echoes. He lets out a heavy breath.

Slowly, he smiles. Robin smiles back. They look at the ceiling so they won’t cry. At least, that’s why Robin’s doing it. She’s pretty sure Steve’s motivation is the same. She’s pretty sure a lot of things about them are the same.

She whispers, "Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re my best friend,” she whispers through a grin. “You don’t have to say it back. Just wanted you to know.”

Robin closes her eyes. It must be at least 3 a.m. and she hasn't slept in so long.

“I do,” Steve whispers. “You’re mine, too.”

Her jaw and shoulders relax as her back sinks into the mattress, and she doesn't reach out to turn off the lamp.

When Robin wakes up in the morning, her fingers are cramped. Steve’s hand is warm, though, and she’d like to hold onto it for as long as he’ll let her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> that's all folks! 
> 
> thanks to everyone who took the time to read this fic, give kudos, or leave a comment. knowing that there are people who genuinely enjoy my work makes even the worst days a little bit better. 
> 
> as always thanks to my love and my angel sarah (mjolnirbreaker here on ao3, @steveharrington on tumblr) and i'm always available to chat on tumblr @lesbianrobin.
> 
> see you in the new year!
> 
> (probably)
> 
> (maybe sooner)
> 
> (but you didn't hear that from me)

**Author's Note:**

> so i definitely intended to post something by the end of october. i swear i meant to. school just... happened. but here i am! thanks to my greatest love sarah (mjolnirbreaker on here, @steveharrington on tumblr) as always for inspiring, encouraging, and supporting me <3
> 
> title from "the archer" by taylor swift. this should shake out to be four or five parts, and i should get them all up by christmas. please let me know what you think, either in a comment here or by messaging me on tumblr @lesbianrobin! i really appreciate feedback
> 
> til next time!


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